Fractals, Cellular Automata, Chaos Theory, Science, Space, etc

Monthly Archives: September 2017

Another one of my android apps I finally got around to updating and releasing on the Play Store.

YOTZ is my version of the well known Hasbro game Yahtzee. Only for 2 players at this stage because the more I think about trying to code a decent computer AI opponent the more my head hurts. There are some interesting research into Yahtzee strategies out there like this one so maybe one day I will have a go.

YOTZ allows you to play up to 6 games at once. Multiple games are much more interesting than just a single game at a time and lead to more strategies in play.

As with all my apps, this one is 100% free and 100% ad free. YOTZ also needs no permissions to run.

If you are a nerdy science type who likes to read academic and or research papers (for fun or for knowledge) you will have seen for a long time now that a lot of the papers get blocked behind a page that asks you to pay for access to the paper. These “paywalls” usually amount to around $30 to see one individual paper. If you are a university student you can get around this if your institution pays the publisher, but for your average person you do not have free access.

This is very frustrating. Knowledge needs to be openly shared for the human race to advance. The power of shared knowlegde the Internet brings should not be restricted.

SCI-HUB is the latest completely awesome solution (note, may not be truly legal – see wikipedia article for the full history) that gets you access to these paywalled papers. Taken down for now, but mirrors will always crop up (including harder to kill TOR onion sites).

I could go on for pages about the arguments out there. Do some googling on “academic paywalls” to read all the hatred against them. I gave up trying to find a page that said it thought paywalled knowledge was a good idea.

Ever since starting this blog I have always tried to only post positive topics. The old “if you don’t have anything good to say then don’t say anything at all” line. But this topic has and will continue to annoy me past the point of silent indignation.

After some updates for the latest Android versions I have now released the latest version of ADDLED to the Play Store. ADDLED is 100% free and ad free.

The aim is to find a set of numbers that add up to a total value. Initially the levels are simple with just sums using positive numbers, but later levels give larger grid sizes and negatives, multiplication and division.

As the difficulty increases there are more strategies to implement to get through levels.

The levels are quick enough to fill in a few minutes when you have some spare time. There are 5000 total levels to keep you more than occupied.

If you think this is your sort of puzzle game, download ADDLED through the Google Play Store.

1. Added more color palettes
2. Added more sample GLES shaders
3. Added Delete option to remove shaders that are incompatible with device
4. Fixed instabilities with pinch zooming
5. Fixed out of index bug that sometimes occurred with Buffalo Fractals
6. Fixed spinners’ dropdown text colors so they are more visible
7. Fixed bug in GLES shaders that date.w was passed as current second rather than seconds since midnight

I do recommend using a new high end Android phone or tablet. The shaders can crash older devices and general performance can be frustratingly slow on old phones.